Harold Alexander – C-in-C Allied Armies, Italy–the air of steely resolve concealed a lack of grip.
Albert Kesselring, C-in-C of the German forces in Italy. Against odds he made the Allies pay dearly for every mile.
Montgomery, commander of the 8th Army in 1943, meeting some of the Canadians he so admired.
Mark Clark, right, whose great qualities as a commander were marred by jealousy and suspicion, with his trusted chief of operations, Donald W. Brann.
Alfred Gruenther, Clark’s cautious, diplomatic chief-of-staff throughout the campaign.
Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commander of the 10th Army, who later succeeded Kesselring as Commander-in-Chief.
The unlucky Ernest J. Dawley, commander of the 6th Corps at Salerno, who fell foul of Clark.
Richard McCreery, commander of the 10th Corps and of the 8th Army during its final victory. At once profane, puritan and highly professional.
With Alexander, Oliver Leese, left, relaxed, wearing his usual quizzical expression; a disciple of Montgomery, he succeeded him in command of the 8th Army.
“John” Harding, Alexander’s chief-of-staff, a soldier of immense ability.
Fred L. Walker, commander of the much battered 36th Division, who opened the road to Rome at M. Artemisio.
John W. O’Daniel, the “iron man” of the Salerno beach-head.
John P. Lucas, commander of the 6th Corps at Anzio, talking to British commander V. Eveleigh. Like his predecessor, he was sacked after the battle.
Lucian K. Truscott, his successor, who liberated Rome: later commander of the 5th Army.
Gerhard von Mackensen, commander of the 14th Army at Anzio, like his opponent Lucas, he was sacked after the battle.
Traugott Herr, commander of the 76th Corps at Salerno and Anzio; later of the 10th Army.
The defenders of Cassino
Richard Heidrich, 1st Para Division.
Ernst-Guenther Baade, 90th Panzer Grenadier Division.
Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, commander of 14 Pz Corps, a master of defensive tactics.
Geoffrey G. Keyes, commander of the 2nd Corps, right, receiving an honorary CB from Alexander.
Wladyslaw Anders, commander of the heroic 2nd Polish Corps.
Alphonse Juin, master of offensive tactics: Commander of the CEF, saluting with his uninjured left arm.
Bernard Freyberg VC, commander of the veteran 2nd New Zealand Division.
Strained relations
A gloomy Clark, left, Alexander, centre, and right, McCreery, whose rare smile was a danger-signal.
E. L. M. Burns, left, commander of the 1st Canadian Corps, talking to an unsympathetic Leese.
Two thrusting commanders:
C. Vokes, of the 1st Canadian Division.
B. T. Hoffmeister, of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division.
Sidney Kirkman, 13th Corps, who needed all his British phlegm to cope with Clark.
Charles Keightley, commander of the 78th Division and later 5th Corps.
14
ACHTUNG! JABO — “LOOK OUT,
FIGHTER-BOMBERS!”
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
The Eagle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842
In June 1944 a “landbound GI” scribbled off a few lines of appreciation to his air force friends of the past few weeks:
I sometimes wonder if you guys in the Air Corps know how the landbound GIs feel about you. I heard that there was some jealousy and bad feeling between the branches. Nuts! The GIs in the armoured and the infantry worship the skies our Air Corps flies in. We never get tired of looking up when we hear our planes and shouting “give ’em hell boys!” When up front it’s a grand feeling to see them upstairs — to see them clearing the way ahead. Every time we see one in trouble — or in an occasional dog-fight — we’re pulling and pushing like a guy working a pin-ball machine. I’ve heard our top brass talk about the perfect support and cooperation we’ve had from the air!
A GI would never have given the US 12th Air Support Command such praise a year earlier, for it was not until the late spring that the USAAF was able to come to terms with the need to supply the ground forces’ vital requirement for close support, or to accept a safe method of doing it.1 Rather, when American aircraft came to support him his first impulse would have been to take cover in his slit trench. Even as late as the Battle of Normandy the troops used to say, “When the Typhoons [RAF] come over the Germans take cover: When the Thunderbolts are over we all take cover.” As for the brass, when General Omar Bradley was in Sicily he complained: “We can’t get the stuff [i.e., close air support] when it’s needed, and we are catching hell for it. By the time our request for support’s gone through channels the target’s gone or the Stukas have come instead.” So did General Ryder: “I noticed that in action when my tanks started rolling or my artillery opened on some target of real importance to the Germans the Stukas would be over in twenty minutes … failure of our air support is the weakest link in our tactical team today.” After Salerno Clark had complained to Alexander that his requests for direct support through his air liaison staff had seldom been accepted, and when they were the air force response had been slow. It had taken the crisis of the battle, on September 13, to persuade the USAAF to come to his aid, when they had raised the daily mission rate from 66 to 587, and used their heavy bombers to wreck Battipaglia. The lesson should have been learnt, especially after it became clear that the USAAF policy of road interdiction had done little to prevent the move of the 14th and 76th Panzer Corps to Salerno.
But, as we have said, the air force commanders considered the air battle indivisible. They were governed by the doctrine that the US Army Air Force had acquired from the RAF and was enshrined in Field Manual FM 100–20, issued in July 1943. Close support for the army was low in their list of priorities. Their first task was to win air superiority, for without freedom to use the skies the other tasks were not feasible. Next came the interdiction of the land battlefield. The army was expected to provide its own close support and the air force would only attack targets beyond the range of artillery. After Salerno the first aim of the air force seemed to have been attained, except when the Luftwaffe made a special effort, as it did at Anzio. The tactical air force therefore devoted most of its energy to interdiction. In giving close support to the Fifth Army the 12th Air Support Command had not yet a system as effective as that of the Desert Air Force, RAF and Eighth Army in the final stages of the war in North Africa, for Americans interpreted FM 100–20 rather rigidly and the battle had not been sufficiently mobile, nor the weather suitable to give favourable opportunities to exploit its power on the battlefield often. Without opportunities and practice, techniques could not be tested nor the skills of the pilots perfected. Moreover, the American air commanders’ view of the strategy of the war in Italy differed from that of the ground commanders. Indeed, they did not seem to be fighting the same war.2
The US Fifteenth Strategic Air Force was in Italy to wage the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) in company with the American Eighth and the British Bomber Command in the skies over Germany. When the Fifth Army was poised to enter Italy over the beaches of Salerno, the air war was entering a new phase. August 17, 1943, the day the Sicily campaign ended, was the anniversary of the US Eighth Air Force’s first operation against targets in France and marked the start of its daylight penetration to more distant targets such as Wiener-Neustadt and Schweinfurt. Its losses during those long and largely unescorted flights were prohibitive and the replacement of lost crews and aircraft inadequate. Consequently, competition for air resources between the UK, the Mediterranean and other theatres, already acute, was sharpened. The Mediterranean commanders had to choose between ensuring that their air operations served the CBO just as their ground operations had to serve OVERLORD, or risk having aircraft and crews transferred to USAAF bases in England.
“Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Force and also deputy chief of staff to Marshall, was like a restless spider in his Wash
ington office, driving himself to a heart attack and his subordinates in the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) to frustration and fury by his needling letters and goading. He and Marshall were as one in their support for the CBO, although Marshall did not share the opinion of Arnold and Carl “Tooey” Spaatz (Tedder’s deputy in the Mediterranean until December 1943) that the invasion of Normandy might not be necessary if the CBO was given all the resources Arnold and Spaatz demanded. When Spaatz succeeded to overall command of the US strategic bomber forces engaged in the CBO he and Marshall were united in their resolve that the ETO, not the Pacific theatre, should have first claim on US air resources, and that the CBO should have priority over all other operations. Both men suspected that the British were not whole-heartedly committed to OVERLORD, and neither regarded Italy as a substitute for it, or even as a legitimate contender for resources required for the strategic aim. Another factor bearing on support for the army in Italy was that both the USAAF and RAF chiefs believed that given the necessary resources the CBO should obtain a decision unaided by the ground forces, and as a result they saw the ETO as a single front. The land generals saw Normandy and Italy as rivals.
Eaker, who had commanded the US Eighth Air Force in the trying early days of strategic bombing, went as commander of the newly formed Mediterranean Air Force in the great pre-OVERLORD shuffle at the turn of 1943–4. Subordinate to it was the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force, and the strategic bomber force, the Fifteenth Air Force commanded by Major-General Nathan L. Twining, assigned to operate from airfields in Italy against the southern part of the CBO target area. So Eaker, as firm a believer in the supremacy of air power as any, was installed in the Mediterranean, with Spaatz as his direct superior in CBO matters in England. At the same time he was Maitland Wilson’s chief air officer and adviser and commanded all the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean theatre.
In mid 1943 Eaker and his colleagues were satisfied that as far as Phase 1 of their doctrine was concerned they had achieved local air superiority, but the situation in the air war as a whole was horrific. At that time heavy bombers on long-range missions had to defend themselves against fighter attack with their own armament, which they proved unable to do. (And could not until the long-range P 51 fighter fitted with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and drop tanks came into service in December 1943.) On August 17, 1943 the Eighth Air Force lost 60 aircraft and over 100 damaged out of 380, and 600 aircrew killed, wounded or missing during raids on Regensburg and Schweinfurt. On October 14, 229 heavy bombers took off to attack Schweinfurt and its ball-bearing factories again and “the burnt out wrecks of der dicker Hund (as the Germans called the B 17 bomber) marked a trail hundreds of miles long”, the prey of 300 Luftwaffe fighters. Sixty more aircraft and their crews were lost and seventeen aircraft so badly damaged that they were never repaired limped home with many of their crews dead or wounded.3 Eaker’s first aim in 1943 was therefore to conduct operations over German-held Italy calculated to bring the German fighters to battle and destroy them so that they could not be used to reinforce the CBO area. He had the added incentive that his own heavy bombers were about to join in the battle in the air over Germany and had already visited the Romanian oil fields.
The air strategy adopted with this aim was the interdiction of the German Army’s lines of communication and in particular the Italian railway system, hoping simultaneously to provoke the German air defences and also assist the ground war by forcing Kesselring to shorten his supply lines by withdrawing to the line Pisa-Rimini. When evidence accumulated that Kesselring intended nothing of the sort it seemed to the air commanders imperative to take advantage of the long communication extending from northern Italy to the Gustav Line and plan a well-coordinated air programme. Honorary Group Captain Solly Zuckerman,* scientific adviser to the RAF, had analysed the effect of bombing on the Italian railway system during the spring and summer of 1943, consulting Italian railway officials, aircrews and the air photograph interpreters. His report was used by Eaker when drawing up the interdiction programme for the late winter of 1943–4.
Zuckerman concluded that supplies could never be halted completely or permanently for there was too much surplus capacity in the Italian railway system, only 5 per cent of which was required for military purposes. However, it was feasible to bring it to such a state of chaos that road transport, which consumed much precious fuel and was less efficient, would have to be used over long distances, and kept standing by at potential bottlenecks in case of need. That had been the situation south of Rome in August 1943, according to Italian railway officials. The correct targets to bring about the desired effect were marshalling yards, not so much the tracks, although their destruction would be a useful by-product, as the rolling stock, engines, repair shops and the labour force from the area. By repeatedly disrupting the relatively important ones, the business of making up and despatching trains would have to be dispersed over many small sidings and rendered inefficient. Essentially Zuckerman’s conception was strategic and not tactical. Over a long period it would create a condition of anaemia, not rapid death by starvation.
By contrast, the tactical method was to cut the lines at bridges, tunnels, embankments and cuttings. The Fifteenth Air Force had studied the bridge method and reported on December 11:
The relatively small size of bridges makes them unsatisfactory bombing targets in that a large expenditure of effort is required to damage them. The question is whether the value of the expected results of attacking certain bridges will outweigh the expected value of dropping that tonnage of bombs on other targets.
They had hit one bridge in every 190 sorties. There was a marked variation in the construction of Italian bridges and hence in their susceptibility to damage. Most were small targets averaging thirty feet by three hundred and it might take ten missions of thirty aircraft to ensure an 82.2 per cent likelihood of a hit. Even then the bridge might remain serviceable. Naturally, Zuckerman concluded that tactical interdiction should be used only when a battle was in course and only near the battlefield.
It will be remembered that in the first two weeks of February the Combined Chiefs of Staff were impatient with the way the campaign was progressing. On the 10th Arnold wrote to Eaker suggesting that he should use the 2,900 planes at his disposal to blast a way into the Liri valley. Eaker retorted that even if he agreed the army could not make proper use of such support. The army staff had to have accurate locations for the forward troops and have passed them in good time to the air staff, and the assault units had to be ready to jump off the moment the air bombardment stopped, so as to take full advantage of its momentarily stunning effect. He was not in the least confident that the army staff could guarantee either. He preferred the conventional air force strategy, to isolate, or “interdict” the battlefield. Here he had the support of Maitland Wilson. On the 25th Wilson issued the general directive that conflicted with Harding’s plan for a spring offensive. He observed that such an operation should be governed by the air factor; clearly a reflection of Eaker’s ideas. Meanwhile the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), concluding that Eaker’s interdiction plan would not produce quick results, supported Arnold’s idea of using heavy bombers at Cassino. Churchill, who had poured cold water on Wilson’s interdiction plan and approved of Harding’s spring offensive, was not in favour of a pause at Cassino in the meantime. These conflicting ideas influenced the conduct of DICKENS, which was a battle emerging from a compromise.
Neither Eaker nor his deputy, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, expected much from the bombing of Cassino. For his part, Alexander did not expect the air forces to strangle German supplies either, but as the JCS was anxious for territorial gains and yet averse to the battles of attrition in Italy that were absorbing men at a disturbing rate, and as Clark supported the JCS, Alexander agreed to the use of heavy bombers at Cassino and also to Eaker’s new interdiction programme from March until DIADEM began. The bombing of Cassino was tentative and experimental, for the senior airmen had not muc
h confidence in it. Alexander thought that it would save lives, as did Freyberg, who had a strong interest in not wasting them. In fact everyone thought that there was nothing to lose by trying it, and in any case that it would be unwise to resist the advice of Washington.
The mistake made by the staff of the Fifth Army was its failure to grasp the technical details involved and in not analysing the lessons which emerged from the bombing of Cassino a month earlier; something very much their business and which should not have been left to non-specialists in the ad hoc HQ New Zealand Corps. The after-action reports on the Cassino bombing suggested that even if technical failures and human errors had not occurred heavy bombers were too inaccurate for close support. Most of the errors, though, were laid at the door of the army. The target had not been marked continually by coloured smoke, mission leaders had not been briefed on the ground, the choice of flight paths had not been made to suit both the terrain and the location of friendly troops, and the army had not stated clearly the effect that they wished the air force to achieve. Above all, the army had not followed up quickly. In future bombing ought to be over a shorter span of time. Slessor and Eaker commented that they had no right to expect better results from the bombardment than had been obtained from much heavier ones on the Western Front, but the two cases were dissimilar. It had been shown conclusively on the Western Front that when bombardments were heavy, accurate, of short duration and were followed up closely by tanks and infantry they were usually successful.
Tug of War Page 27